With COVID-19 vaccines being approved for use in different parts of the globe, the scale and complexity of their distribution globally will be unprecedented, many reports displayed the corruptions in the distribution systems, and leakages in emergency funding designated for the development and distribution of vaccines, nepotism, favoritism, and corrupted procurement systems.
The distribution of vaccines is yet another sphere were Western capitalist countries can exercise their privilege over developing states through unethical corruption schemes.
The main concern is to make it possible to distribute the vaccine among the rich and poor in an equitable way, ensuring that everyone has the right to receive the vaccine, the world’s inability to provide enough COVID-19 vaccines for poor countries is a global failure that highlights injustice, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday.
“It’s not hesitancy. It’s lack of vaccines. And the situation in many low-income countries, especially Africa, it’s very worrisome,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “There is no vaccine. You can’t even talk about delivery or absorption capacity when there’s no vaccine.”
Inequality in the supply of vaccines between high and low-income countries has created a situation where countries are willing to use personal connections to access vaccines.
For example, representatives of Iraqi Kurdistan contacted M.Thombley a Senior Attorney in the Public Health Division of the HHS Office of the General Counsel to inquire about “eligibility conditions for waiver from HHS/CDC to ship unused COVID-19 vaccines to Kurdistan.
while according to reports in May 2021, Kenya one of Africa’s most populous and economically-developed countries hired the American lobbying company Rational 360, led by a former official of the B. Clinton administration, in order to enlist the support of the US State Department in supplying vaccines to Kenya in excess of the agreed volumes, after that the U.S. donated shipment of 880,460 doses of vaccines to Kenya.
The reports, also explained that the United States is implicated in legal and moral wrongdoing by unequal distribution of vaccine doses to countries with which it is allied, or for political and economic reasons with other countries, without regard to the countless lives lost as a result of corruption, and the millions of the people most in need of vaccinations in low-income countries.
“The US Lobbyists are being used to help desperate countries get a better place in line for life saving commodities that never should have been rationed in the first place,” said Asia Russell, executive director of the international advocacy group Health Global Access Project.
The list of foreign governments that reported using the American lobbying companies includes the Republic of Ghana, Kurdistan, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. However, there could be more.
The number of reports on corruption in the United States shows how it controlled the distribution of the vaccine, making it not only a health and economic crisis, but also a corruption crisis with the lives of countless lost as a result of it.
Source – Omar Ingassou
